Ali Milani worked on Bernie Sanders’ campaign in America. In 2018 he was elected as a councillor in Heathrow Villages. In 2019 he stood for Labour in Uxbridge & South Ruislip, but was beaten by the Conservatives, their candidate being Boris Johnson (whatever happened to him?). Not the most likely place for a young Muslim, born in Iran but brought up on a British council estate by a single parent, to come to public attention.

Ali Milani is a rising star in the UK’s Labour Party, whose perspective on the key political issues we are now facing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic shows how young people from different backgrounds can engage in mainstream politics.

“Just 5,000 votes separated me from becoming the first person in British democratic history to unseat a sitting Prime Minister,” says Milani. “People who had never felt truly represented in Westminster could see in me, an immigrant who grew up on a council estate, and in my campaign, a reflection of their own lives and challenges.”

After such a tumultuous period in politics and public health, The Unlikely Candidate aims to turn that inspiration into a call to action for a new generation who are crying out to create a better world.

Booking essential, please book via Eventbrite.

Tickets: £3.00 without book, £12.00 with book (ie free admission and a pound off the book!)

Smokestack Lightning is the 200th book published by Smokestack Books since 2004, comprising one poem from every book published down the years, many of which are in translation.

Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.

In this event – part of a series of regional events – editor Andy Croft will be joined by his local cohort of writers and translators Rob Francis, Roy McFarlane, David Duncombe, Emma Jones, John Lucas, Deborah Tyler-Bennett and Mike Wilson.

The reading will also form the launch of Neil Fulwood’s Mad Parade, published this month by Smokestack,  poetic rant by one of Nottingham’s many current working class poets.

Mad Parade is a collection of white-hot political satirical poems taking the piss out of some of the knaves and fools who parade their poisonous egos across the world’s stage – Tony Blair, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump. Funny, furious and profane, it’s a book of hit-and-run poems, take-no-prisoners, drive-by attacks in verse on the Ancient Regime.

Tickets £3.00 or £10 including Smokestack Lightning (£12.00 if posted) or £18 including Smokestack Lightning and Mad Parade (£20 if posted) or £10 including Mad Parade only (£11.00 if posted).

Book your ticket and buy one or both books here, via Eventbrite.

We expect this event to be full so please book in advance!

Note new date

In I’m A Fan a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal heteronormative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour— Sheena Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.

Photo copyright Salam Zaied

Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for film and TV. She is part of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write. At this event she will largely be reading from her debut novel. As part of 4 Brown Girls she has performed at the British Library, the Tate Gallery and as a support act for Sleaford Mods.

This event is in association with Rough Trade Books.

This will be a live event hosted at Five Leaves Bookshop.

Tickets: £3.00, redeemable against purchase.

Booking essential, please register via Eventbrite.

Five Leaves Book Group returns, meeting for the first time since COVID!

Our book group is open to all. Attend every meeting, occasionally or just once a lifetime. All we ask is that you read the book in advance and take part in the discussion. There’s a short introduction by a member of staff or a group regular or someone we know with a special interest in the book in question.

Free, light refreshments provided. Please book in advance via Eventbrite.

It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.

In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.

Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence.

Literary attention returned to South Africa when Damien Galgut won the Booker Prize in 2021 with The Promise, leading to a conversation about the novel with the former Nottingham resident David Dickinson, who has lived in South Africa, including in the townships, for many years. He has written about the AIDS crisis in South Africa and industrial relations post-apartheid. David is a professor of sociology at Wits University, in Johannesburg. He is involved in grassroots political organising among the poor majority, often against the African National Congress of which he was a member.

This event, resuming a tradition of occasional international discussions at the bookshop, will present an update of the current situation in South Africa, with plenty of time for questions. No previous knowledge of South Africa required.

Tickets: £3.00 including refreshments.

Book via Eventbrite

Our book group is open to all. Attend every meeting, occasionally or just once a lifetime. All we ask is that you read the book in advance and take part in the discussion. There’s a short introduction by a member of staff or a group regular or someone we know with a special interest in the book in question.

Free, light refreshments provided. Please book in advance. Eventbrite link to follow shortly.

After the tragic death of his father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house and sound variously pleasant, angry or sad. Then his mother develops a hoarding problem, and the voices grow more clamorous. So Benny seeks refuge in the silence of a large public library. There he meets a mesmerising street artist with a smug pet ferret; a homeless philosopher-poet; and his very own Book, who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

Blending jazz, climate change and our attachment to material possessions, this is classic Ruth Ozeki territory

On August 12th 1952, thirteen members of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee  יידישער אנטי פאשיסטישער קאמיטעט were murdered on the orders of Stalin. Join us to commemorate their 70th יארצייט

S. Lozovskii, J. Juzefovich, Prof. B. Shimeliovich, I. Fefer, L. Kvitko, P. Markish, D. Bergelson, D. Hofstein, B. Zuskin, L. Talmi, I. Vatenberg, E. Teumin,  and Ch. Vatenberg-Ostrovska 

6.30-9.30 (doors 6.00)

SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Speakers: Gennady Estraikh, Professor, New York University and Helen Beer, Lecturer Emerita, University College London                    
Music: Polina Shepherd

Followed by Song Searcher (83 minutes) a film about Moyshe Beregovsky, who recorded and studied the traditional music of Ukranian Jewry in the 192s, 30s and 40s and who was imprisoned in a Stalinist labour camp in 1950.

Tickets (£5.00, including light refreshments) available shortly from the Jewish Music Institute (www.jmi.org.uk)  Organised by the Jewish Music Institute and Five Leaves Publications

For further information email bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

Strong drugs for his patients, strong coffee for him. But it’s not just sleep-giving for this anaesthetist, as he navigates emergencies, patients not breathing for themselves and living with a terrifying sense of responsibility. It’s enough to leave anyone feeling numb. Ed is, by the way, an anaesthetist and a comic. So don’t worry, there’s plenty of laughing gas to be had.

Basically he has two jobs, keeping people alive by putting them to sleep and – separately – making people laugh their socks off, often about medicine, often about his day job.

He even looks like the medic he is.

He also created and presented “Infectious Personalities” broadcasted on BBC Radio 2 where his guests include Charlie Brooker and Sindhu Vee. Ed has written and performed on BBC Radio 4, for shows “Now Wash Your Hands” and “Newsjack”, and he has also written for the Guardian about the intersection between medicine and comedy.

www.edpatrickcomedy.com

Booking essential, please book via Eventbrite.

Ticket prices – £5.00 without a book, £10.00 with a book (collected on the night or in advance from the shop)

We’ve been waiting on Giselle’s first collection of short fiction for some time, noticing her stories being published in all the best places… and we glad to see this collection out, and to launch it, with the established writer of short fiction Alison Moore’s new collection – both from Salt Publishing.

Giselle Leeb’s short stories have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Ambit, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Litro, Black Static, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and other places, She is an assistant editor at Reckoning Journal. Giselle grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham. This collection moves effortlessly between the realistic and the fantastical, as their outsider characters explore what it’s like to be human in the twenty-first century.

‘Alison Moore’s Eastmouth… beautifully captures the sinister timelessness of an off-season seaside resort, twisting the everyday mundane and making it disturbing.’ —Keith Brooke, The Guardian. Brooke is right, Alison can make washing the dishes seem like the prelude to something disturbing. This is her second collection of short stories. Her novels include The Lighthouse, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Booking essential as this will book up! Eventbrite link to follow. As will book cover illustrations!

Tickets £3.00 (redeemable against purchase), which includes light refreshments.